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With due respect, that's a caricature of my argument and I do not agree that I'm "practically" making it. I care equally about the feelings and safety of all human beings regardless of sex or gender. My concern here is based exclusively on the probability that more rapes would result from one policy over the other. It isn't remotely the same thing as saying I think a cis woman being raped is any better than a trans woman being raped.
I agree this would solve the problem, but nobody seems keen to make it happen. As you say at the end of your post, however, this is ludicrously far from the Overton window. So long as this is a thing, I don't think you're going to get anywhere advocating for that. Hell, if we agree with the principle of putting trans inmates in a special segregated section for safety, couldn't you do the exact same thing at a women's prison? I have greater confidence that the wardens at a women's prison would keep a close eye on transfem inmates to make sure they aren't raping anyone, than I have that the wardens at a men's prison would look out to make sure that the trans woman inmate isn't being raped.
(But fundamentally, again as per the end of your post, any rape-mitigating policy on trans inmates is a flimsy bandaid on a huge festering gash. We simply need to end prison rape in general, which I wholly believe to be achievable, and then… well, and then progressives can say trans women should be sent to women's prison for normal dignity reasons, and conservatives can say trans women should be sent to men's prison for normal insisting-on-the-primacy-of-biological-sex reasons, without rape coming into it. Which will be a step in the right direction.)
If trans women would be segregated in either case, why then is it important for them to be housed in a women's prison?
Otherwise, I disagree that a utilitarian calculation of which solution results in fewer rapes is the correct solution. Absent prison reform on the scale we'd both probably prefer, I will argue that being (and presenting) as a woman is a choice for trans women. They have choices they can make about how they want to interact with male prisoners. Female inmates don't have choices if trans women (many of whom I think are opportunistic and not really trans in a meaningful sense) are dumped in with them.
I wouldn't necessarily call it important, within that hypothetical. It's a matter of optics. But it's preferable, because all else being equal, I think it is morally preferable for trans women to be treated as women by society unless there are compelling practical reasons otherwise. Putting the segregated section in the women's prison sends the message of "we recognize trans women as a special category of women, although there are caveats and sometimes we won't treat them exactly like biological women". Which is about right for how the state should treat trans women in general. In contrast, making the "trans women's prison" a section of men's prison sends the message that trans women are to be regarded as a special category of men.
It's not exactly one they can walk back if they've already had breast implants, though, is it? So at the very least this wouldn't apply to post-op trans women. But I'm also skeptical that the average trans inmate could feasibly go stealth. A biological male who's been living in a female persona for years is going to have a very hard time passing for a macho man again. (This is, of course, the primary joke of The Birdcage.) She might stop broadcasting that she's a trans woman, but odds are the nearest rapist will still identify her as Some Sort Of Queer - assuming the wardens don't simply share that fact with him on purpose, see Wikipedia link in the previous message - and avail himself to her backside anyway. I guess this would dissolve the resulting rapes into the general male-on-male rape statistics, but I think that's pretty cold comfort.
And all of this is without going into the question of whether incentivizing a trans person to detrans against their will via a structural risk of rape would be a grossly unethical thing for the system to do, which I think it would be.
Well, you are right that the question is fundamentally whether trans women are a special category of women or a special category of men, and we simply disagree there.
That being said, I still think that putting trans women in women's prisons is more unjust and hazardous to women than keeping them in men's prisons is hazardous to them, at least without much more stringent requirements about who's allowed to identify as trans so they can go to a women's prison.
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